Changes in the Poetry Column in Shojo no tomo : Free Verse, Children's Songs, Short Poems and Poems for Young Girls

Abstract

This paper offers an overview of poetry aimed at a young female audience, with a focus on the poems that appeared in Shojo no tomo (Young Girls' Magazine) during the Taisho Period. The magazine's editorial policy underwent significant changes during this period, and yet its poetry column has received hardly any attention from scholars so far. This study reveals that while Shojo no tomo had always been bound by the editorial requirement to include some expression of sentimentalism, the poems which were published in it went through a transformation from long, colloquial epic to concise, self-asserting short poems (called shojo shokyoku, or shojo shi) for a young female audience. This transition accompanied the process by which readers became writers themselves. It also participated in a larger development, by which young girls' poetry was diffused to a broader audience, such as children, women and indeed the general public, via other genres such as short songs, children's songs, and folk songs.